Late Nights on Air

by Elizabeth Hay

It's 1975 when beautiful Dido Paris arrives at the radio station in Yellowknife, a frontier town in the Canadian north. She disarms hard-bitten broadcaster Harry Boyd and electrifies the station, setting into motion rivalries both professional and sexual. As the drama at the station unfolds, a proposed gas pipeline threatens to rip open the land and inspires many people to find their voices for the first time. This is the moment before television conquers the north's attention, when the fate of the Arctic hangs in the balance. After the snow melts, members of the radio station take a long canoe trip into the Barrens, a mysterious landscape of lingering ice and infinite light that exposes them to all the dangers of the ever-changing air. Spare, witty, and dynamically charged, this compelling tale embodies the power of a place and of the human voice to generate love and haunt the memory.

Genres: Fiction, Canada, Book Club, Contemporary, Canadian Literature, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

368 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 18, 2007

About the author

From Elizabeth Hay's web site:
"Elizabeth Hay was born in Owen Sound, Ontario, the daughter of a high school principal and a painter, and one of four children. When she was fifteen, a year in England opened up her world and set her on the path to becoming a writer. She attended the University of Toronto, then moved out west, and in 1974 went north to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. For the next ten years she worked as a CBC radio broadcaster in Yellowknife, Winnipeg, and Toronto, and eventually freelanced from Mexico. In 1986 she moved from Mexico to New York City, and in 1992, with her husband and two children, she returned to Canada, settling in Ottawa, where she has lived ever since.

In 2007 Elizabeth Hay's third novel, Late Nights on Air, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her first novel was A Student of Weather (2000), a finalist for the Giller Prize, the Ottawa Book Award, and the Pearson Canada Reader's Choice Award at The Word on the Street, and winner of the CAA MOSAID Technologies Inc. Award for Fiction and the TORGI Award. Her second novel, Garbo Laughs (2003), won the Ottawa Book Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award. Hay is also the author of Crossing the Snow Line (stories, 1989); The Only Snow in Havana (non-fiction, 1992), which was a co-winner of the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-fiction; Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (non-fiction, 1993), and Small Change (stories, 1997), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Book Award, and the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Hay received the Marian Engel Award for her body of work in 2002."

Reviews

[Diane Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like fast paced, action filled, plot driven novels, this this is not your book. However, if you, like myself, love beautiful prose, slowly mounting realizations, characters you come to know and love little by little, and immersion into their lives and the story being told, grab this book and don't let go until you finish the last wonderful page.
It takes place in the wilds of northern Canada in 1975, at a small radio station in Yellowknife. Harry Boyd is the station manager, overseeing the quirky, independent people who work there, some of them runaways from other places and situations, some of them from the native population. Five of these people form the nucleus of the novel, and four of them decide to make a 6 week, 500 mile trek through the great barrens of the north. This changes all of them in unforseen ways, and sets in place the paths of their future lives.
I found myself reading for their lives, as though I could only insure their happiness and safety by not taking my eyes off the page. I was actually on the page with them, approving their decisions, or hoping against hope they wouldn't make the wrong ones. They didn't listen.
Elizabeth Hay is a magician with words, and seduces you quietly into her world, then doesn't let you go, even after turning the last page.

"The phrase that came to her mind was "the long and sudden of it." We go on and on through the long months of our lives until we hit a sudden moment that stuns us."

That's the truth of this book.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Small town honesty, and big town drive”.

“Lake Nights On Air”, with its unforgettable restraint and quiet beauty — the luminous language — the diverse cast — and the emotional, spiritual, and physical terrain— takes place in the mid-seventies in Yellowknife, Northwest Territory, on the shore of Great Slave Lake…..(broadcasting from Northern Services radio station).

I picked this book - specifically because I have an interest in everything Canada …..including great Canadian writers.
And by next week, our younger daughter and her husband will be living in Victoria, British Columbia (near the Cook Street Village district….moving from Alberta,Calgary).

But back to this story:
We first meet Harry Boyd, mid forties, when he’s a little grouchy.
He was pretty hot stuff as a veteran radio broadcaster in his twenties—but now twenty years later — he’s kinda chopped liver. He failed at TV….(and we know he misses his successful radio days).
Then one day ….actually one ‘night’, Harry hears an unfamiliar voice on his radio station: Dido Paris. Dido was a new person hired —-(it’s unclear of her desired sexual choosing: M or F or ???)….but she is a dynamo beautiful young woman — and leaves a mark on every person she meets.

Gwen Symon ….(whom the novel focus on most) ….is a young woman hoping to break into radio. She is naïve and innocent with a lot to learn. Watching her development overtime is quite inspiring.

We’ll meet the radio stations receptionist: Eleanor Dew. She had a marriage that only lasted six months — to a man she never had sex with.

Ralph Cody is the stations reviewer and nature photographer.

Eddie Fitzgerald is The stations technician, a Vietnam vet.

During the summer of 1975 — and the second half of the novel, the radio characters take an Arctic adventure through Canada’s Barren Ground wilderness……following the path of an explorer, John Hornby.
A six-week canoe journey started to sound inviting to me too…..well, until the reality of how dangerous it was.

The descriptions are masterfully written — so vivid — I’d get chilly cold in some scenes.

The cast of characters interpersonal relationships together — with their own interesting personalities — is a wonderful bird’s-eye-view of humanity at play…… there are jealousies, competition, animosities, as well as camaraderie.

A wonderful literary novel… a reminder to me of how complicated the most ordinary things and people can be. …….
So much tender-beauty…..storytelling …..and an experience of the great vast geography of Canada.

[Maciek · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm surprised that this novel won the Giller Prize - one of Canada's most prestigious literary awards. The pacing is glacial, the characters uninteresting, and there's no real plot; the whole book is a collection of situations which happen to the cast, and since we have no real reason to care about any of them there's little to make us want to turn the page. Late Nights on Air is simply not compelling, and I almost didn't finish reading it.

I was drawn to the book because of its premise: a novel of people working together at a radio station, in the far north Canadian town of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, during the 1970's. There's something about the remoteness of this area that attracts me - perhaps it is its quietness and desolation, which make it one of the last places on the planet where a person can truly be detached from the rest of the increasingly globalized world; where it just takes a few steps to see the sparse but beautiful landscape of the tundra, largely untouched by man. The same place is also unforgiving with its enormous distance to the rest of the populated country, and unrelenting weather with very cold and long winters. For many, radio is the only medium with which they can communicate and stay in touch not only with the world but with their own neighbors, as conditions outside make travel either very risky or downright impossible.

Elizabeth Hay does a great job with describing this setting; late in the novel characters embark on a kayaking trip where we feel as if we've gone with them, and witnessed the barren beauty of the tundra firsthand. But the characters themselves are rather flat and I found myself unable to care if they experience any personal growth or not, and their various storylines often did not connect into a coherent whole. One of the novel's themes which should be important but isn't is the construction of a pipeline which would run through a First Nation territory - it felt heavy handed and irrelevant to the rest of the text, and failed to make any impact on me.

I expected Late Nights on Air to be a novel about the North and its people, their lives and problems: loneliness, poverty, concern about the environment. All these themes are touched upon but not elaborated, and the fragmented nature of the book doesn't help. I'm sure there are better northern novels, and I'm looking forward to reading them.

[Carol, She's so Novel ꧁꧂ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Abandoned with some relief at 66%

I was born in Canada & have family who moved to & had some success in Yellowknife. I've consciously (I'm sure I read a few books where I didn't know the author's nationality!)read very few Canadian authors, other than Margaret Atwood and L M Montgomery. I really wanted to like this book!

Unfortunately the language is beautiful but empty & the plot (if you could call it that) moves at the speed of concrete. Other than Harry I never cared about any of the characters - and even Harry I don't care enough to flick to the end of the novel to find out what happened. I didn't feel I learned much about Yellowknife's special character.

Better books are waiting for me.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

(4.5) I read my first novel by Hay, A Student of Weather, last year. It was wonderfully rewarding even though it took me a month to read. By contrast, I read the Giller Prize-winning Late Nights on Air in half that time. Most of it is set in 1975–7 in Yellowknife, a small city in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Here winter lasts for eight months and you can still meet with snow and frozen lakes in early July. A tight-knit cast gathers around the local radio station: Harry and Gwen, refugees from Ontario starting new lives; Dido, an alluring Dutch newsreader; Ralph, the freelance book reviewer; menacing Eddie; and pious Eleanor.

Everyone is in love with everyone else, so you get these layers of unrequited romance and a sense of exposure: not just to the elements, but to the vulnerabilities of admitting one’s feelings and risking professional failure. The novel is also about appearances and assumptions – “You don’t look anything like how you sound,” Gwen says to Harry – and the dangers of obsession. Four of the station employees set out one summer to recreate the six-week journey of Arctic explorer John Hornby, a trip that ends up being as wondrous as it is fraught. Hay’s foreshadowing is a bit heavy-handed, and I found the final chapters after the expedition a slight letdown, but overall this is a marvellous story of quiet striving and dislocation. I saw bits of myself in each of the characters, and I loved the extreme setting, both mosquito-ridden summer and bitter winter. I need to read the rest of Hay’s oeuvre stat.

Favorite passages:

Harry’s professional advice to Gwen: “Radio was like poetry, he told her. At its best it could be, while television was like a blockbuster novel: one made you think and feel, the other dulled your mind. … ‘To be any good you have to believe it’s hard. It’s called creative tension. … And you won’t be any good until you’re dedicated to something outside yourself.’ … I learned that a mistake is just something you go on from.”

“Something blossoms in an unlikely place. An oasis of trees miles above the treeline. An arctic river warmer than any other water they’d come upon. The four of them bathed in the waters of the Thelon, wading out into it, almost swimming. On shore they towelled themselves dry and dressed, and there was no feeling to equal the splendour of warm clothes on river-cold skin.”

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This 2007 winner of the Giller Prize is set in the mid 1970s in Yellowknife (in the Northwest Territories of Canada.) It details the lives of the people working in the local radio station and then follows four of them as they go on a canoe trip to trace the route of John Hornby in The Barrens. I'm glad I came across this book, enjoyed reading it, but will have to knock one star off my eventual rating for atrocious overuse of foreshadowing.

[Zinta · Rating 5 out of 5]

You’ve heard it said, “hurts so good.” About the writing style of Elizabeth Hay, I can say: cuts so soft. Her words, her turn of phrase, her sweet sentence construction, it is as precise and expertly sculpted as with a sculptor’s chisel or a surgeon’s scalpel. Yet soft. The sharpest knife enters your flesh with hardly more than a red line—and finds its target. The heart. The reader’s mind. There are no ragged edges here.

The setting for this novel intrigued me right away. The book was a choice in my book club, recently joined, and I thrilled to the story description of northern wild, a small group of misfits who broadcast from a radio station in a town called Yellowknife, where there is nothing but radio.

I was suddenly back in my days of traveling northern Canada and Alaska, and listening to a voice on the radio, passing messages from friend to friend, husband telling wife he would be home late, George telling Harry that the part he needs for his truck has arrived, and hello! Shirley’s baby is born!

Late Nights on Air has more sophistication than that, and this group of radio broadcasters and technicians and managers bring with them more than just the drama that flies over the air. There is also the air between them. And their love of the clean air about them. But at the same time, there is that intimacy of community, of strangers connecting by bond of shared humanity. Late Nights on Air is love story of the misfit, love story of the northern wild, love story of life, lived however we manage. And like all love stories, these loves, too, die, except, perhaps, the one for the open wild.

A proposed gasline runs through the story like a guideline of place to cut. Hay makes the incision cleanly, and from this opened place emerge the voices of the town, those who have come to it because they found they did not belong anywhere else, and those who belong there root and soul and have so through ancestry. What we see in that opened place is the wilderness inside a man’s, a woman’s heart, and also the stunning wilderness of northern Canada, in this town called Yellowknife and far beyond. It is a cruel yet beautiful world, and we are spared neither cruelty or beauty.

Such fine lines Hay writes:

“…her voice sounded like a tarnished silver spoon…”

“…in the free and easy woods of herself…”

“…constant light was like endless caffeine…”

“…she seems to want to erase herself…”

“At stake was something immense, all the forms of life that lay in the path of a natural gas pipeline corridor that would rip open the Arctic, according to critics, like a razor slashing the face of Mona Lisa.”

“The girl had laced up the soft shoe of her voice.”

“Dido had a vibrancy about her, like a watered plant after a drought.”

“Such a lot to unpack from that slender gift of a sentence.”

“…in the wind their voices tore like fabric…”

“And the thought came to him that it wasn’t just one person who had died, but all the filaments of life connecting that person to everyone he’d ever known and to every place he’d ever been.”

“The sight of her did something to his heart. He felt its exact location and entire size inside his chest.”

And there, she’s done it, Hay has done it: thrown away all the excess, trimmed away all the fat, and left the words that describe a moment, a sensation, an image, a life exactly. She has even done the remarkable, passed my personal test of expert word artist, and written both one of the best love scenes I’ve read in many years (and not one thing graphic or crude about it), and later, one of the most profound breaking up scenes I have ever read (and not one thing graphic or crude about it, either). Add for frosting on this Arctic ice cake one of the most memorable death scenes I’ve encountered on written page, without a single note of melodrama about it. These are typically the scenes where even the best writers fall into muck. Where even the best writers die, impaled on a cliché. Hay shines.

These human lives tangle and untangle, and they tangle, too, into the wild around them, and there is great sacrifice, yet also great humanity. Not in the deeds marked by medals and honors, but moments marked by one human being alleviating, for but a passing instant quickly moved into memory, the loneliness of another before both go on their way again. These are the imperfect, caught lovingly in their fascinating imperfections, and made perfect by the artist who captures them so on paper for our witness.

Late Nights on Air is winner of the 2007 Giller Prize. Elizabeth Hay is a former radio journalist, author of six other books, all of which I intend to read, and winner also of the Marian Engel Award. She lives in Canada.

[Connie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth Hay worked as a radio broadcaster in Yellowknife forty years ago, and she revisits that isolated area in Late Nights on Air. Set in 1975, it was a time when radio was being replaced by television. The environment and the northern way of life was also being threatened by a proposal to cross the frozen Canadian tundra with a gas pipeline.

The radio station employees are imperfect people who are searching for what they want in life. Some have traveled from more southern areas, hoping to find it in Yellowknife. They have been disappointed in their careers and by love in the past, and are looking for a new start.

Written in beautiful literary prose, the story builds slowly for the first half as Hay looks into the souls of the complicated characters at the radio station. My favorite part of the book is the later part, involving four of the characters following the route of John Hornby and two companions, explorers who perished in the Barrens in the sub-Arctic in 1927. The descriptions of Yellowknife and the Barrens are exquisite, with the location also becoming an important character. This is a book for people who are willing to take the time to savor Elizabeth Hay's writing because it is a character-driven story in an unfamiliar world.

3 1/2 stars, rounded up to 4.

[Mary S · Rating 3 out of 5]

I almost didn't finish this book. The first 60 pages were tiresome to drag myself through. Then Ms. Hay caught me with something so "Northern Canada" that I was immediately hooked. It was a print out of messages that CBC used to read over the air -- things like " Joe Blogs, get in touch with the RCMP at Fort Rae for an urgent message from your brother Ron." or "To the Blogs family, Resolute Bay. Jannie had her baby. A boy, 7 lbs 2 ounces. Mom and baby are doing well and say hi."

I lived for a short time in the Yukon and NWT in the 1970's -- about the same time this novel was supposed to take place, and those messages brought me right back to listening to the radio in the north. Also, many of us had our own crystal or CB radios and used them to communicate with our bases in the cities of the north. I spent several hours each day on the radio.

The second thing that Ms. Hay was able to do was paint a wonderfully vivid picture of the tundra -- the Barren Lands. I loved the attention to the botany.

Too bad that the rest of the story didn't quite keep up. Why, for example, does Ralph suddenly decide he loves Eleanore? Ralph didn't even seem like a major character, and suddenly he is a huge focus.

So, slow to start, great detail and feeling of the north, but characters that are a bit on the "who cares" side. But, maybe that's just like life.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Canada's North has always fascinated me, and I enjoy reading fiction and nonfiction about it. Although LATE NIGHTS ON AIR by Elizabeth Hay is a fictional novel set in 1975 in Yellowknife and surrounding areas, it felt like the characters were real and I was with them experiencing life in the remote Northwest Territories and working at the radio station. Elizabeth Hay has worked for CBC Radio in Yellowknife, Winnipeg, and Toronto, so had experience in that setting.

I immediately liked Harry Boyd, Ralph, Berger and Lorna Dargabble and, soon after, Eleanor Dew, Gwen Symon and Dido Paris. I felt that Hay sowed seeds of suspicion towards Eddie Fitzgerald and Irving Dargabble, and distrust for them grew in my mind.

Hays way with words was spectacular in describing the landscapes, characters, settings, actions, non-actions, and moods.

While talking with Gwen, Ralph said,
'"The Romans razed it [Carthage] to the ground. Then they sowed the surrounding fields with salt. That's the North, if the pipeline goes through." He was struck by his own analogy. "Not bad, Ralph. Write that down. Building the pipeline is like sowing the ground with salt."'

'"Berger had spoken of the arctic wilderness as "the last of North America, the eighth wonder of the world." This was after he'd flown by helicopter along the arctic coast and seen migrating caribou, three grizzlies and several wolves, and dozens of seals on the sea ice."'

Near the beginning of their excursion, Harry was tired, grumpy, and cranky.
'She [Eleanor] said, "Watch you don't slip a cog."

Later on as his body got used to the physical labour, and the harsh weather gave way to sunshine, Harry became more relaxed and easy to get along with.
"To Harry it seemed the Barrens relaxed. 'One day something relaxed inside and I saw things in a new way.'
The words came from an old book about a botanist, and he felt the truth of them as they left behind frozen lakes and entered a land of flowing rivers."

I agree with the following quote from the front book flap.
"Hay has a skewering intelligence about the frailties of the human heart. Weaving stories from the past into the present, she builds a fresh, erotic, darkly witty and moving tale, replete with sentences that stop you dead because of their unexpected wisdoms and startling beauty. Like radio, LATE NIGHTS ON AIR creates sudden intimacy over long distances, and like the North, it is spare, compelling, and charged with unusual life."

Quotes from the back cover:-

"Hay exposes the beauty simmering in the heart of harsh settings with an evocative grace that brings to mind Annie Proulx." - Washington Post

"Elizabeth Hay now clearly stands as one of our major writers. Deep intelligence, striking originality, a powerful capacity to move us..."
- National Post

"Elizabeth Hay has created her own niche in Canadian fiction by fastening her intelligence on the real stuff - the bumps and glories in love, kinship, friendship." - Toronto Star

"Hay brings her extraordinary attunement to the sensuousness of landscape....Painterly in its lyricism, profoundly female in its voluptuousness, and acute in its psychology."
- Booklist (starred review)

I enjoyed reading this Giller Prize Winner and give it 4+ brilliant stars ⭐️️⭐️️⭐️️⭐️️

[Hannah Holborn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A character in Elizabeth's book describes good script writing as having simplicity, directness, and intimacy. Late Night on Air achieves all three. Whether we love or hate the main characters by the end of the book, we also know them as well as our own skin. And we know something of the north--its timeless fragility, and its ability to both save and destroy those who venture there.

[Wanda Pedersen · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can’t get much more Canadian than this novel—it is written by a former CBC employee, it involves the national radio service, there are questions of identity, there is self-discovery through a wilderness trip, and it takes place in the North, mythologized by all of us southern Canadians.

Two young women, Gwen and Dido, come to Yellowknife to craft lives and identities for themselves through working on the radio. I related to Gwen’s search for herself through her radio work, having worked a very public volunteer job where it was necessary to create a public persona for myself. How useful that persona was; it created a framework upon which to hang the various facets of my life to display them to those around me, but most importantly to myself.

And where else do you search for yourself? The North, of course, a mysterious place to those of us who live pressed up against the 49th parallel, much closer to our American neighbours than to the vast majority of Canadian territory. The people, the wildlife, and the landscape of the Barrens are beautifully invoked, with the canoe trip of discovery forming a rather dreamy portion of the plot line. It made me wish that I was one of the adventurous folks who went on camping trips, canoeing in the wilderness, identifying the delicate wildflowers and observing the skittish caribou. I have friends who do these kinds of things and I long to have the ability and the courage.

Running in the background of Late Nights is the whole question of the MacKenzie Valley Pipeline Project and government/business relationships with the aboriginal populations. In that way, it is a timely book for today, as struggles ensue over several pipeline projects and relations with our native populations are in turmoil.

On a personal note, two situations in this book got me thinking about a woman that I was friends with long ago. She became involved with a very possessive man and I think she mistook it for “love” as opposed to power. I often wonder about her, as when I last talked with her it was obvious that he was controlling her to an extreme extent and I was very worried. I was cut out of her life rather quickly, as he was busy separating her from her friends and family. Recently we had a significant milestone school reunion and the organizer sent out lots of email to see who all she could round-up to celebrate. My former friend, a gentle, polite woman, replied in a rather hostile manner and asked that she never be contacted again. From this, I assume that she is still with her controlling partner and still acquiescing to his wishes. I continue to wonder how she is, where she is, whether she will ever escape.

Perhaps that is why this book left me in a melancholy mood. But for me, that melancholy feeling is a desirable one in literature and I enjoyed wallowing in it for the remainder of the evening.

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aaah, like the tiny beautiful artic flowers, this is a finely woven tale. The characters are all searching for themselves in this most northern landscape where the air, light, sounds and silence are like no other. One could look at this landscape and see little but harshness, nothingness, cold or one could marvel in the beauty of life on small and vast scale, hear the wind speak and connect with the environment and others. The four main characters journey together and separately and each changes, no they find something else. A very good read.

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada, during the mid-1970s, the novel is focused initially on three people associated with the local radio station: novice Gwen Symon, interim station manager Harry Boyd, and alluring host Dido Paris. The narrative follows their interactions, along with other radio employees and local townsfolk. The storyline builds toward a pivotal canoe trip that several characters undertake into the Barrens, following the route of a real explorer, John Hornby.

The historical backdrop includes the 1975 Berger Inquiry into a proposed Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, which addresses conflicts between newcomers and indigenous peoples. The radio station setting allows Hay to examine how we present ourselves to the world. The characters' relationships with their own voices - Gwen's initial uncertainty, Harry's professional polish, Dido's seductive control - become vehicles for exploring authenticity.

Hay's lyrical prose captures the landscape's stark beauty. The tone is melancholy. It is slow-paced with an emphasis on atmosphere and introspection rather than external action. It speaks to fundamental questions about belonging, environmental responsibility, and the human need for both connection and solitude.

[Autumn Chrunik · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love that this book is set in Canada and is written by a Canadian author, but I can't get into the story. I didn't understand it and did not feel any connection to the characters. And when I paused to stop reading it for a few days, it made me not want to pick up it up again, or try anything else. This one sadly, just isn't for me.

[C.A. Simonsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Beautiful story in beautiful prose about Canada's mystic North and the people who inhabit it.

It is the 1970s and two new voices arrive at a Yellowknife radio station. One of these cheechakos is a natural in front of the microphone, the other is not. Veteran radio man Harry Boyd, not only mentors these newcomers but finds himself enraptured by each - nearly as much as he is enraptured by radio itself. And as the radio hams form relationships, the community debates the inevitable arrival of a new pipeline, wondering what its construction will do to their economy, their natural world, their people.

The last third of the book was most engrossing for me: the animals of the Northwest Territories, the landscape, the history, the interminable light and darkness. I loved the nod to John Hornby and immediately listened to the 1954 dramatization/early podcast. Today, it seems an almost forgotten desire to live apart from society - to have nature be one's society.

Well done, Ms. Hay! Late Nights On Air makes me want to seek out books that encapsulate life in all of Canada's wondrous regions.

"No matter how they moved around the low trees, reaching up or down or forward or around, the animals seemed exquisitely placed, as if by an Old Master."

[Ian M. Pyatt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book piqued my interest as it mentioned radio and in my youth I wanted to be a DJ on a Top 40 rock'n'roll radio station, but alas that did not happen.

I enjoyed the book with all the diverse characters, I assume. one might come across living up north. Each were well conceived, written and they all had some interactions with each other, be they good or bad or indifferent.

The canoe trip with Ralph, Harry, Gwen and Eleanor was great, I enjoyed the description of the terrain they went through, their discoveries of plant and wild life, etc. It was truly sad that one person died, but I assume was written in as a fact of being in that type of area for that length of time.

The details of Justice Berger and his research into pipeline development was well written as well.

The parts describing Ottawa brought me "home" as I lived there for 20 years. I knew exactly the areas listed; Chateau Laurier, the market (it's the Byward Market), the streets.

[Juniper · Rating 5 out of 5]

this review is for the audio edition, narrated by the author.

elizabeth hay spent years working in radio with the CBC, so she totally has the vocal chops to narrate her own work. i have had the pleasure of seeing hay in-person, so knew i would be in for a treat. plus, this is a novel i already love, having read it twice in paper. i was completely transported by listening to the story. though, there was one moment in the book that i, now that it was experienced it again, have decided i must have very purposefully evicted any memory or recollection ability from my brain. look authors - yes, all of you 😂 - not many of you can write sex scenes well. it seems to be an achilles heel for so many literary writers. given how eye-rollingly bad some of this kind of writing can be (there is a reason the 'bad sex in fiction award' exists), my deepest hope is that, at the very least, the author had a hell of a good time coming up with their passages. i cannot even begin to guess what hay was thinking on, but i fear the moment is now burned into my brain forever, and i kind of want that brain space back. again, 😂 😂 😂. if you *must* know, and apparently you do, hay includes a scene in which she describes one character's penis, through another character's feelings about it. length and girth are mentioned, and there is a comparison to an oh henry! bar. i mean... what? the character pondering her partner's penis wasn't even hungry, and there was no 9 ½ weeks scene going on. i fear i will never look at an oh henry! bar the same way. ever. again. that brief moment in the book aside, i still love this story, and how vividly hay brings yellowknife, nwt to life. i love it when settings are weighty characters in excellent stories.

[LibraryCin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This story revolves around people who work at a radio station in the mid-1970s in Yellowknife, NWT. Dido and Gina are fairly new to Yellowknife and the radio station. All the men seem to be attracted to Dido.

Wow, this was boring. There were a couple of mildly interesting things that happened – thee was debate on a new pipeline that a company wanted to put in and a woman disappeared in winter. But, overall, pretty slow and boring. And I didn’t see one likable thing about Dido, who seemed to just go back and forth between the men. In fact, I don’t think I really liked very many of the characters… maybe Gwen, but then I skimmed so much of the book in the end, so hard to say if she really was likable.

I’m not sure why I added it to the tbr… looking now, I see it was either nominated for or won the Giller Prize, which should have been a red flag waving me away, but if the story initially sounds interesting, I will still often try them. I see the GR description also says “Written in gorgeous prose…”, which should also be a warning to me.

[Allison ༻hikes the bookwoods༺ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally, a book I could really sink my teeth into! After a summer of disappointing reads, this one was just the balm I needed. Elizabeth Hay is a very talented writer and I look toward to reading more of her work.

[Christina McLain · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this book was a flawed masterpiece. The story of four quirky characters who meet at a radio station in Yellowknife in the 70's is many things: an ode to the Canadian north,a study of radio and the impact it has on isolated communities and individuals, an essay on the effect of development on the environment and indigenous people and at its heart, the tale of star-crossed lovers, Dido an enigmatic and seductive announcer with a fabulous voice and Harry,the hapless station manager with a soft heart and a world-weary manner. Harry adores Dido but she sets herself on a self- destructive course by falling for the angry abusive sound technician Eddy. All of this is witnessed by fellow employees,Gwen and Eleanor, who care about Harry and are baffled and irritated by the goings-on. The story begins in the summer of 1975 and continues in the following year after Dido's abrupt departure, when several of the characters make a life changing journey into the Barrens following the journey made by an ill-fated British explorer who they admire. I think the reason why I say the book is flawed is because the pace is very slow but as the author explains, it's like the events of life... "on and on and sudden,"when we experience a turning point or a moment of clarity. This book was clearly written by an author with a love of nature, Canada, and an interest in the lost and lonely passageways of the human heart.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I spent more than half of this book wondering what the ScotiabankGiller prize people were thinking. Divisadero was in the running. But Ondaatje's book takes place in the US and France. By the time I got to last 1/3 of Late Nights, I realized it gives us a picture of the far north probably not often found, and I think it was this that tipped it in the judges' favor.

That last 1/3 makes it worth ploughing through the beginning, which is uneven. At the beginning, the three main women were not distinctive enough in my mind, and I felt myself looking back to see who was who. Before long, however, they began to be clearer, though I still wasn't intrigued enough with their back stories. It wasn't that I disliked them, but that they lacked sufficient personality to be interesting. In fact, I don't think the men were especially interesting either, although they were certainly different enough from each other that I could never have been confused.

I live in a small town, and many think it is remote. It is a metropolis easily accessed when compared with Yellowknife, NWT of the mid-1970 setting in this novel. Yellowknife has grown since then, and is a bit more accessible. Still, I can easily relate to the characters calling places other than their town "outside." That's what we call anywhere other than Alaska. When we travel to the lower-48, it's called going "outside."

The GR description refers to a planned natural gas pipeline. I was surprised to find this didn't have much to do with the overall story.

[Juniper · Rating 5 out of 5]

elizabeth hay is an amazing writer. seriously beautiful with her prose. this story made me cry. twice. i don't tend to cry when i read books. but this is what happens to me when i read her books - i become so invested in the plot and with the characters that it seems so very real. the triumphs and tragedies sit with me personally and occupy space in my heart.

if you are one to time your reads to the seasons, this is a perfect winter book.

[Catherine Daigle · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5
I adored this book. Definitely not for everyone as the book is more about the characters than any series of events but what rich characters they are. They are so real I swear I could smell them. I'm really looking forward to reading more books by Elizabeth Hay.

[Bonnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I laughed and I cried and I marvelled and I kept reading in one long sitting.

Very deserving of The Giller, in my opinion.

[Penny (Literary Hoarders) · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is much to appreciate in Hay's Late Nights on Air....the writing and most especially her exquisite way of writing truly believable characters and circumstances. The dynamic of these characters in their work and private environments was one to read with wonder and awe - truly believable and wholly realistic writing and situations.

There were multiple poignantly written moments, and I've marked down many. That ending was beautiful and I loved that ending. But if I was honest with myself, I would have to rate this more of a 3.5 star book. The poignant moments and that ending have enabled me to give it a 4-star rating here, because truly, it is excellent - but - I can't quite deny that I wasn't completely enraptured while reading it - I'm not sure if it's because of my reading mood right now? I have just finished reading 3 books back to back to back that were over 400, then 500 and finally 600 pages long. I could be a little burnt out.

Sorry if I'm rambling. Perhaps I should have waited a little longer before reading this one, but it's not to say I did not completely appreciate it. As was the case in A Student of Weather, the Canadian place/locale is as much a character in the book as was Harry, Gwen, Dido and the rest!

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve been reading a lot of excellent Canadian novels lately. Elizabeth Hay is a new writer to me, and this novel fits right in with my recent literary trips to Canada. This time the place is Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, on a huge lake I’d never heard of. The novel reminded me of Charles Baxter’s fiction: odd relationships, a nice slow pace, a deep sadness. Here the sadness comes from characters who have moved to the middle of nowhere not to make it in the oil rush, but rather to get away from something or because they failed in the “outside” world. There’s a soft beauty to Hay’s prose and to her view of the world. Like so many novels that don’t depend on plot, for me this one goes downhill a bit when the novel shifts from Yellowknife to the tundra further north and then pulls together the loose ends. But it doesn't ruin the novel at all.

[Katy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great imagery and great story. An eclectic group of co-workers in an unlikely location on an unlikely adventure. This test of relationships is really relatable because it could be everyone's story even though the adventure may not be quite so daring-- very thought provoking ! Just a great read interspersed with laughter and emotion.

[Ron Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the good old days, before we had to worry about the Internet killing off everything, we used to worry about the survival of radio. First television drove the industry into the music corner, and then corporate consolidation, rightwing cranks and shock jocks homogenized the dial to death. Let a thousand podcasts bloom, but they can't replace the special intimacy we used to feel late at night in the car or at home -- lonely or missing someone -- listening to the silky voice of a sympathetic deejay holed up in a studio, talking into the dark.

Elizabeth Hay misses that voice, too. In fact, in the 1970s and '80s she was that voice. For 10 years she worked as a radio broadcaster for the CBC in the Northwest Territories, an experience that informs her discerning new novel, Late Nights on Air. Set in the bleak town of Yellowknife, about 250 miles from the Arctic Circle, her story meanders through several years in the lives of a collection of misfits at a public radio station. Though weighty themes rumble beneath the tundra of this plot, Late Nights is an understated, easy-to-overlook book. Fortunately, it won Canada's Giller Prize, and that prestigious recognition -- wholly deserved -- may bring it to the attention of readers who will respond to its subtle wit and wistful spirit.

Hay's affable hero, Harry Boyd, is a deejay "with a nearly forgotten reputation for brilliance." He peaked early, went on to host a television talk show that bombed, and lost everything: career, wife, dignity. An old friend "pulled a few strings to get him a night shift in the Northern Service, the very place where he'd started out fifteen years ago. . . . Now he was an old fish in a small pond." It's 1975, and the sudden departure of the station's manager (ran off with a waitress) has raised Harry to the position of temporary boss, but late at night when he can play and say whatever he likes on the air, he still wonders how he ended up back here "in the little rabbit warren of rooms known at CFYK."

This is essentially a love story, but of muted, smothered love, passion that blossoms not at first sight but at first hear. The novel opens when Harry catches the "slow, clear, almost unnatural confidence, the low-pitched sexiness, the elusive accent" of Dido Paris reading the news. She's a gorgeous young woman from the Netherlands -- "Who didn't fall in love with her that summer?" Hay asks. Besides her striking appearance, "she was zealous in her compliments and capable of the most reckless intimacy." Dido learned English by listening to recordings of Noël Coward, which only partially explains her intriguing accent. ( Late Nights lavishes attention on the tone, cadence and tenor of characters' voices; we can hear these people even better than we can see them.) Now, running from a bad marriage and an untenable relationship with her father-in-law, Dido begins a flirtatious relationship with Harry that he knows can't lead to anything more, even as he hopes it will.

Along with this smoldering love affair, Hay outfits the little Yellowknife station with a quirky cast of employees whom we gradually get to know and care deeply about. The receptionist, Eleanor Dew, is the gracious gatekeeper of the office, an ageless woman whose Christian faith is sorely tested by loneliness. Gwen Symon -- "an odd mixture of crippling modesty and immodest determination" -- drives more than 3,000 miles to present herself at the station and ask for work, having been told that "anyone as inexperienced in radio as she was should try the hinterlands first." Eddy Fitzgerald is a brooding, redheaded technician with an aura of revolutionary violence.

We meet a few regulars around town, too, especially Mrs. Dargabble, who makes a "lofty, loquacious, regular plea for classical music," and 60-year-old Ralph Cody, the station's book reviewer, whose "appetite for talk was barely whetted by the ten minutes allowed him on the air."

The plot of this novel is a faint signal, a series of short moments, sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, often flecked with intimations of tragedy. Hay's writing is so alluring and her lost souls so endearing that you'll lean in to catch the story's delicate developments as these characters shuffle along through quiet desperation and yearning. You'll also begin to hear how Hay is deepening the range of this book. Behind the office conflicts and fumbling couplings of the gang at CFYK, a major national debate plays out: A well-respected judge is roving around the country patiently conducting public hearings about a proposed natural gas pipeline that threatens to disrupt the lives of the native people and scar the Arctic "like a razor slashing the face of the Mona Lisa."

This interesting environmental backstory reflects the anxiety Harry and his colleagues feel about their own future -- torn between dread and impatience. They're all drawn to the haunting true tale of John Hornby, an English explorer who lost his life in 1927 trying to live off the land deep in the North. The final third of the novel describes Harry, Gwen, Eleanor and Ralph on a fateful six-week canoe trip that follows the path of Hornby's last journey. The trip, over several hundred miles through lakes and forest, provides an even more striking showcase for Hay's talent, her psychological acuity and her command of striking natural settings.

There's real sadness here, but real tenderness, too. Hay listens to these people -- their surprising comedy and their fragile needs -- with enough sensitivity to catch, as she puts it, "a single word balanced atop a mountain of feeling."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...

[Krista · Rating 3 out of 5]

I find myself slightly annoyed after reading Late Nights on Air. I've never been up to the Territories but have long been slightly fascinated by the North: I would love to go on one of those Polar Bear tours up in Churchill, or see the Northern Lights in Whitehorse, or witness the Caribou migration (as described here) outside of Yellowknife. I also know that I am too intimidated by the wilderness, and the wildlife in it, to ever attempt the epic canoe trip described in this book; in fact I'm too lazy to take out a canoe on the glassy lake my parents live on, too nervous to let my dog off leash in the city in case of coyotes. But going into this book, I was really hoping for a Northern experience, and I don't know if I got it.

I was trying to find some old quote I thought I knew that says that all Canadian literature is really about geography-- a quote that I have found curious because, as a Canadian who has always lived in cities, the geography of my life isn't terribly different from people who live in cities anywhere in the world. What I found, repeatedly, were references to Margaret Atwood's Survival A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, wherein she argues that all Canadian literature is about is the notion of survival and its central character the victim. As this book is set in the timeframe that Atwood wrote her book, I don't think it's a coincidence that all of the characters in Late Nights on Air come off as victims (every female character is obsessed with her relationship with her own father, some are the uncomplaining victims of physical violence from their partners, the Natives are victims of Colonialism, the landscape is the victim of the white settlers, men are the victims of drink or their own passions, etc.) As it is probably also not a coincidence that this is really a book about survival, I take this as an homage to Atwood and her themes, but I have to believe that in the 40+ years since her critical study was published, Canadian literature has moved on from this narrow perspective. Something about this book, therefore, felt diminishing to me.

I was also annoyed at the politics of this book-- from the boosterism of the CBC (whose funding today are tax dollars I resent paying) to the notion that all of the Natives who opposed the Mackenzie Pipeline project were doing so out of a selfless regard for the purity of the ancestral grounds it would defile. The last is particularly timely as right now we debate the similar project, the Keystone Pipeline. I have often thought that if the main argument against the pipeline is environmental, then surely pumping fossil fuels south, through two countries that already have strong environmental regulations, must be safer for the Earth than extracting oil in countries without such strict rules and then shipping it across the ocean in tankers. In this book, however, a small scene that describes the skittishness of migrating Caribou goes a long way towards influencing my ideas about the harm of running a pipeline through their calving grounds. Finding the people in this book sketchy and not all likeable, I would have liked more scenes with the animals, more scenes with the wilderness, more of a Northern experience.

I was also annoyed, at times, by the writing style. Many passages were fragmentary, which can be poetic or disjointed. Where they were poetic, I revelled in them. Where they were disjointed, I was confused and a little bored. I actually can't believe it took me two weeks to finish this book, but I was rarely looking forward to picking it up.

My last complaint: the excessive foreshadowing. I don't know if I have ever read a book that promised so often that something horrible was going to happen. The device did not keep me intrigued, and by the time the tragedy occurred, I was just happy to be getting near the end of the book.

I'm not surprised that Late Nights on Air won the Giller Prize; it is unabashedly a Canadian novel, if something of a throwback to early Atwood, but in the end, you know what I wanted? More Canada. At the risk of negating everything I said about not thinking Canadian literature can/should be reduced to its geography, the following geographical passage is where I think Elizabeth Hay gets it right in this book:


Somewhere between three and four in the morning, as they were paddling back, they saw a world that Ralph might have photographed had he seen it, and that Gwen would later try to paint. But it wasn't possible to duplicate the colours except by closing her eyes. Then the islands in the distance became the right shade of jet black, and the sky and the water were an identical, intense, unblemished peach.



I would love to see that scene, even vicariously, and am left wanting more.